Industrial - November 5, 2020

I've been so excited with photos this last little while.. walks by the river, some amazing sunsets, spectacular morning light, shots with the moon. It was time to up my game so I put my bike in the car. The plan was: I'd drop Jen off at work, park somewhere, then ride around and cover more area. See more things, get more photos! It'd be epic!

Today was the day. Time for a new game.. I dropped off Jen, parked in Bridgeland, unpacked my bike and started out.. it was going to be epic. except for gloves. I forgot to bring gloves.

It's been a great fall.. the weather has been holding, winters been approaching slowly but it was a bit cooler this morning. Temperatures hovering around freezing.

Not bringing gloves is the kind of thing that you do when it's been warm enough to not need them so you don't even think about it.. never enters your mind. But then, one day you're out there riding your bike along the river and you realize that maybe you should have thought about it because hooptie-dandy are your hands cold.

I'd ridden east along the river, following it around over towards Ogden. Sometimes trying to ride with my hands in my pockets to warm them up, not really seeing anything. Then I came across the scene above. 

Initially I'd spotted a person walking under the bridge in the shadowy part creating a silhouette. I liked the effect and stopped, put my bike down, took off my backpack, got the camera out and after all of that the person was gone.. perhaps I was too slow because my fingers were numb from the cold. Luckily another fellow was headed that way so I causally waited around at the corner, not looking like a creepy camera guy at all, until he was in position.. for some reason I didn't get a silhouette but as I took the photos I found I liked the compressed view and the 'busy-ness' along the top of the frame. 

There wasn't anyone else around to try again with so I repacked the camera into my backpack and continued along my way.  In the distance I saw a stack of rectangular structures on top of the old brewery so I rode over that way to get a better look. I though for sure I could find some photos here and it looked pretty interesting. After a short ride I locked my bike to a tree and started scouting out the area.

There were quite a few 'no tresspassing'/'keep out' signs posted so I made sure to stay onside. From my vantage point I used the zoom lens to frame up some compositions along the corner of the building. The sun was pretty much clouded out but once or twice it was able to shine a bit of light onto the scene.

Notice how I've not taken a photo of the Calgary tower yet.. Ha! 

While hunting for a composition all of a sudden a bunch of pigeons (all of them?) jumped up and flew in a circle (probably it was more of an oval than a circle) and promptly landed back on the building.  Well then.  I wasn't ready for it, but I would be for next time! so I waited for it to happen again.

And it did. and I thought, why not again.. and again.. 

Eventually I was able to tear myself away from the orbiting pigeons and noticed this piece of railway track on the ground. It's like the track use to be here but then it was ripped up and this was the end of it that was left behind.

I wanted to get a photo so I swapped lenses (from the zoom to a wide angle) and laid down on the ground to try to compose an image. I noticed that I was blocking the sun so I wiggled over and tried again.  A few attempts later and here it is.

From here I rode through Inglewood and explored a few of the side roads south of 9th ave.. which was fun because I'd not been in that area before and there was lots to see. I'll have to head back sometime.

I did get some more photos and if I end up posting them to my smugmug site, you can view them here.

Thanks for looking.